Why the Sony PSP is so great

This will be the first in a series of several articles on the PSP. I bought one of these at Christmas as something to accompany me on my travels – at the time I was spending a lot of time on buses and sitting round in hostels.

The main purpose of the PSP is obviously the games – the PSP has a good range of games for all tastes, along with analog control and by far the best screen of any handheld. What many people maybe do not know is the PSP can do so much more:

Photos
The PSP can be used to store and view digital photos. Its easy to rack up several thousand photos in a logical gallery structure on the memory cards which are available in up to 4GB capacity. Great for showing off you favourite phots when Flickr isnt and option….

Movies
The PSP can play UMD movies which are available cheaply, but it can also play movies encoded on your home computer. Its possible to fit several DVD’s on a 1GB card, or lots of TV shows. Encoding is easy in the most part, with excellent automated encoders readily available.

Homebrew
The real draw for me was the avaialbility of homebrew software which runs on the PSP. The majority of this is dedicated to emulators – so my PSP can play NES, SNES, Master System and Megadrive Games (Genesis) games among others. With so many ROMS available on the net (possibly illegally ).

I plan to break the above down into a series of posts with greater detail on each subject and some tutorials.